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Lecture Recap :: Marilyn Moedinger

When I first learned I was going to see Marilyn Moedinger speak, I was
really intimidated. Luckily I got my hands on her book, 103E-75W Adventures in
the Vernacular: Investigative Observations of Residential Climate Mediation,
beforehand and got a little sneak peek into what she was all about. The book was
very helpful and easy to understand, it seemed to be evenly balanced with text
and pictures. The pictures were stunning, the graphs and diagrams were very
effective, but the photos she took on her trip seemed almost unreal.

Cover of Marilyn's book

Like in the book, she started off the lecture with a little
explanation as to how she got started with all of this. She picked the line of
longitude 103E-75W, the specific line she picked is arbitrary, and she only
picked that one because both her hometown in Pennsylvania and her place of work
in Falmouth, Jamaica fell on the same line. She continued this line all around
the globe and used this way to organize her research, as an organizing axis.

Photo from Marilyn's book showing the line of longitude she followed.

Marilyn traveled for 5 months around the world. Once she started traveling,
she realized that her purpose had changed. She tried to stay away from the word
trajectory because trajectory implies a known path. She doesn't know her path
and instead of trying to answer the questions she originally had defined,
she was now just trying to re-frame those questions. She organized the lecture
into 5 parts, "ground", "frame", "process",
"wander", "think and draw", and "re-frame". As designers, we have to interact with the world in a responsible way. We're
not just historians writing and observing, we have to actually exist in the
physical world. For her process, Marilyn did a lot of drawing in the field and
she used different instruments like a pedometer and a thermometer. She's clever
and innovative; she said that one day when one of her devices broke, she had no
way to document the ventilation of the huts she was staying in. She then
noticed that a lot of people smoked indoors so she watched what happened to the
smoke and recorded that.

Specifically, the type of home she stayed in when she was out in the desert
or in Mongolia was called a ger, and she was fascinated by them. They were collapsible
tent like structures that consist of three layers: structure, insulation, and
cladding. The structure was made of lattice walls, posts, poles, and a
compression ring. The insulation was made of felted wool and the cladding was
made of canvas. They used solar panels for energy. They operated the gers
several times throughout the day and they would alter it based on things like the
sunlight and the wind. The gers were ventilated, they had water, heat, light,
and solar exposure.While traveling, she discovered many different types of buildings. Among them
were the gers, but there were also Asian shop houses, and board houses in Jamaica. They were all
built a certain way for a reason. In Jamaica she also visited several shops
and restaurants that built their houses from shipping containers. They modified
the shipping containers to fit their needs as the years went on. These people
have the right idea, modifying and operating their homes so that they work with
the climate. If we're going to shelter ourselves, shouldn't we delight in the
result, and shouldn't our shelter work with our climate?

Marilyn is also a teacher. When she went out on this journey, she
thought she would find strategies and methods. What really happened was much different;
she came up with different questions like: How do you ask questions? What’s the
real problem you're trying to solve? How are you going to go about it? She
tells her students, and herself, that you must trust in the process to uncover
these things. The question she’s working on now is How can she teach her
students all that she's learned, without sending them each all around the world?

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